Archive for July, 2018

After seeing the Brazil game, Paul and I had a four-day wait for our next live action. At previous World Cups we had always seen matches at more than one venue, but this time we’d opted for a more leisurely stay in just the single location.

There’s plenty to do in Saint Petersburg though and we started off with a wander around an old barracks just across the river from our hotel. It had a church with a golden spire that I doubt would have lasted too long in Teesside.

On the same day we called in at a museum to see a collection assembled by one of the Tsars, Peter The Great. Pete seemed to have a bit of a scattergun approach to collecting, similar I suppose to my own where late evening post-drinking ebay sessions have seen me amass anything from postcards of Norton to houses in Bulgaria.

I’ve not yet started a collection of dead babies in jam jars though, or of two-headed calves. Still it’s probably just a matter of time and whilst some visitors politely feigned interest in stuff like the Red Indian clothing it was fetuses in formaldehyde and the cows that could drink and moo simultaneously that everyone was really there for.

There’s a much bigger museum in town, the Hermitage and whilst it didn’t appear to have any bovines blessed with multiple bonces it did have some Eskimo corpses that had been discovered in glaciers somewhere. Unfortunately the queues for tickets were too long for nothing better than icy Inuits and so the most we saw was the building and the big square outside.

All the culture fitted nicely around the three games a day routine with us mixing up the various pubs that we watched each match in. There were traditional Russian bars, Irish bars, a middle eastern place where the air hung heavily with smoke from hookah pipes and an English bar with a regal presence.

It was the Tower pub where we watched a quite astonishing first half performance from England against Panama. I remember being derided on a football message board as a ‘Southgate apologist’ for defending Gareth during his spell at the Boro. No doubt the same people were the ones later describing him as an ‘FA suit’, employed only because he was a ‘yes-man’. My current interest in England’s national team is mainly because of his Boro connection and it’s great to see that our Carling Cup captain has well and truly silenced his critics.

In addition to the bars, there was also the Fan Fest. I’m not usually that keen these days on loud, drunken crowds, but the atmosphere around Saint Petersburg was so good that we thought we’d have to give it a try one afternoon.

Thankfully there was a Russian alternative to Budweiser and it was enjoyable to sit in the shadow of The Church Of The Spilled Blood and watch Belgium and Tunisia play out a nine-goal game of what my Mam might describe as ‘shotty-in’.

By Tuesday it was time for our second live game, Argentina against Nigeria. It was make or break for both teams and after a few drinks in a city centre Irish Bar watching a Denmark game featuring ex-Boro players Martin Braithwaite and Viktor Fisher, we took the subway up to the stadium.

There were an abundance of Messi shirts among the crowd, that might quite easily have been two-thirds Argentinian.

The process of getting in to the stadium was as easy as it had been for the Brazil game, although this time our seats were on the dugout side of the ground and so we had to walk around almost all of the stadium due to the one way system that was in place.

We had a couple of beers and then took our seats among what is probably one of the noisiest crowds I’ve ever been in. I had to shout in order to make myself heard to Paul in the next seat. There were small pockets of Nigerian fans around the stadium but it seemed as if everyone else was cheering on Argentina.

Messi, perhaps stung by the “Messi, Ciao” chants that had been randomly breaking out wherever we had been over the previous few days set Argentina off on the right foot, but after Nigeria equalised from the spot it was difficult to see how the South Americans would come up with a necessary second goal.

Nevertheless, the Argentinian support never wavered, particularly from the bloke behind us who seemed to know no other word than ‘Puta’ and who struggled to keep his beer within his plastic cup. Their support was rewarded with a late winner that sent Argentina into the next round and despite us having to lap the full stadium to get to the subway we managed to get ahead of the celebrating fans and were away before the volume of people brought things to a standstill.

It was a great week, in a city where I could quite happily live. The media had been putting out the scare stories prior to the tournament in the same way that they did before South Africa and Brazil and if it were down to me I’d lock up some of the editors and proprietors for their lies and the worry that they caused. The reality was that the claims could not have been more wrong and not only did we see no trouble, but the people we met could not have been friendlier. Well done Russia and roll on Qatar.

I watch a lot of lower-level football, quite often where the players are unpaid and the crowds are in double figures at best. Sometimes though, it’s good to watch the game at an elite level and it doesn’t get much more elite than a World Cup. Paul and I had been to the last three World Cups and I’d been looking forward to this tournament since the hosting nation was announced. Russia has always seemed to me to be a ‘proper’ football country, particularly in the Soviet days with Lev Yashin in his black kit and Oleg Blokhin in a CCCP tracksuit.

If the tournament itself wasn’t elite enough, we’d struck lucky in the draw for a change and our first game pitched Costa Rica against Brazil. How good was that? Watching Brazil in a World Cup moves eliteness up to a whole new level. I’ve a bit of a soft spot for Brazil. I suppose most people do. I’d like to say it dates from the Juninho era at the Boro, but I can remember wearing a Brazil shirt in ’94 to cheer them on to their fourth star in a variety of Edinburgh pubs.

Paul and I flew into Saint Petersburg the day before the game. Immigration went super-smoothly with our Fan-Ids serving as visas and after a taxi journey in drizzling rain we were at our hotel next to the Niva River. We had good views of some old buildings and we were in time to catch the second half of the France v Peru game in one of the hotel bars.

In addition to showing the match on the telly, the hotel also seemed to be hosting some sort of ‘Russia’s Got Talent’ style competition in a curtained-off section of the room. The curtain provided little protection against the loud drumming that accompanied most acts and so we headed off out in search of somewhere more suitable for the 9pm game between Argentina and Croatia.

A bar around the corner proved to be a better venue with the game up on a couple of big screens, local beer at under two quid a pint, sausage and cheese for snacks and a forlorn bloke in an Argie shirt at odds with the rest of the bar who seemed to delight in the Croatian win.

We left not long after the final whistle and with twilight closing in picked up a couple of bottles of cider from a window in a wall to finish the evening off.

Next morning was match day and as an app on Paul’s phone suggested that stadium was an hour and forty minutes away on foot, we thought we’d set off about eleven and take in the sights on the way to the ground. It all started well. We passed numerous historic looking buildings and saw plenty of fans milling around.

After an hour or so there were fewer people in replica shirts and we were out in the suburbs. The architecture from a hundred and fifty years ago had given way to Soviet era apartment blocks and more modern-day high-rise buildings.

After two hours of walking and with another two to go to kick-off, Paul decided to check that the ground we were walking to and were still more than half an hour away from, really was the World Cup Stadium. Well, what do you know? It wasn’t. We’d just spent two hours walking towards the an old stadium where nobody, least of all the Brazil team, was appearing. The confusion appears to be due to the correct location having a variety of names ranging from the Arena Stadium to the Zenit Stadium by way of the Saint Petersburg Stadium or the Krestovsky Stadium. I’ve a feeling that we had been well on the way to the old Zenit ground rather than the new one. It would have been nice to have seen it, but not, I suppose, at the expense of a World Cup game.

Fortunately Paul’s app gave us directions to the correct ground that involved a few stops on a bus and a couple of subway rides, enabling us to arrive with fifty minutes to spare.

The access to the ground was managed by a one-way circuit. As we made our way towards the gates, there were frequent chants from Brazilians, Costa Ricans and neutrals alike revelling in the misfortune of Argentina the previous evening.

The queues at our gate were well-marshalled and whilst I did see riot police loitering, they kept a low profile and left the crowd management to stewards. In order to get through the turnstile you had to have the bar code on your Fan-Id scanned and then the bar code on your ticket.

With your photo on the Fan-Id and your name on both, the system looks to have killed touting stone-dead. In contrast to every other tournament I’ve been to where tickets have been readily available, I didn’t see anyone trying to off-load spares and I only noticed one person looking to buy.

Once inside, we got a couple of Buds. Whilst I’m appreciative of FIFA’s stance on selling alcohol and their willingness to allow it to be swigged in the stands, I’d like it a whole lot better if they could find a better global beer partner. Or, if it’s all about the marketing, just sell something decent in a Budweiser cup.

Our Category One seats at two hundred and ten dollars a pop were half-way up the upper tier, about level with one of the goals. We were a long way from the pitch but the fairly steep incline in the stands helped a little with the view.

I’m not sure how the ticket allocation was organised. We’d bought our tickets blind before the draw, but the stadium was probably half full of Brazilian fans, or at least spectators in Brazil shirts. There were random small blocks of Costa Ricans, each one maybe two or three hundred strong.

The lack of segregation made for an unusual atmosphere. We had Costa Ricans in the row behind us, with Brazilians to the right and left. These fans ignored each other and took the safer option of taunting rivals ten or twenty yards away instead. The Brazilians struck me as being quite arrogant, frequently pointing to the stars on their shirts or holding up five fingers and a clenched fist to highlight the difference in the historical achievements of the two sides.

Both fans were united however in their condemnation of anything they didn’t like with a cry of “Puta” or one of its variants. No matter what irked them the instant response was to suggest that the perpetrator or his Mam was on the game. It’s all a bit tiresome really.

Mind you, I was tempted to sling a few insults myself at whoever had decided that Brazil would wear blue shirts. It’s Brazil FFS and if I’m finally going to see them I want the full experience with the iconic kit. There’s nothing wrong with the blue shirt but it’s like when, say, The Waterboys don’t sing their ‘Whole Of The Moon’ song. Perfectly acceptable if you see them fairly often, but if it’s your one and maybe only time, you want to hear their hit.

The performance of the five-times champions wasn’t much better than their choice of shirt. They were cagey in the first half, with Willian getting the hook at the break for as less a Brazilian performance as you could imagine. They were a bit more forceful in the second half but it took until injury time for them to get the opener, quickly followed by a victory-confirming second goal, much to the delight of the fella to our right.

There was a walk through the woods to the subway after the game where foam-handed volunteers were positioned to high-five the departing fans. We had been intending to call into the Fan Fest but the queues were a little on the long side so we popped into a nearby hotel instead for the second half of the Nigeria v Iceland game and then headed back to the bar we’d been in the previous night for Switzerland and Serbia.

After what could have been a disastrous trip to the wrong ground, it turned out to be a pretty decent day in the end.